Answer questions before comments

A Norwegian broadcaster NRK presents a new way on its website that people have to answer a few questions before they leave comments (Griffin, 2017). The intension of which is as quoted:” The extra time should also force people to think a little more deeply about what they are commenting on.”

Of course it is effective to have readers confirm they really understand what an article is talking about, but I doubt that if it’s also helpful to calm them down to avoid aggressive or unfriendly comments. For normal readers, they would probably give unfair comments if they don’t read through the whole news, which is based on unintentional acts. Therefore, this kind of quiz will assist to “correct” the thoughts and then avoid biased comments that may affect other readers’ judgement and arouse misleading viewpoints about the news. However, for cyber violence, the group who express purposely their angers to society, discriminations to diversities, and invasive words to women or children, the new measure would lose effectiveness.

If we think about this further, is this a kind of filter to lead readers, or netizens to expand it broadly, to behave what the website administrators want them to? For now, it is a small quiz about content of news. While it can also be guiding questions to filter out people who don’t agree with arguments proposed in the articles, which turns to be a violation the freedom of public speech. I believe It’s true that the Internet should not be a place outside of law, but demarcating the freedom to constraint is definitely a hard case in network environment. For instance, some social media companies authorize people who posts or website operators permissions to delete negative comments, which causes dissenting opinions like it is vague to define what sort of comments are negative. In that case, undesirable comments will not be shown under the posts. On the other hand, they may have the administration authority of their own posts including comments if we treat the cyberspace as countries that everyone has absolute sovereignty of individual space.

Reference:

Andrew Griffin (2 Marth, 2017). News site makes readers answer questions to prove they understand story before posting comments. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/nrk-norwegian-news-site-comments-read-story-understand-post-quiz-questions-a7607246.html